In Guatemala’s Maya biosphere reserve local people are making a living from trees at the same time as increasing forest cover, showing nature is best protected by those who depend on it.
Mark Hillsdon writes in The Guardian as part of the publication’s Age of Extinction series. Illegal logging is an increasing issue across Central and South America tied into power and criminality. These communities, in the Department of Petén, are working to bring sustainability to their endeavours and to bring jobs and other benefits to the local populations.
The low rumbling grows louder until a huge harvester crashes into the open, dragging a 15-metre trunk of mahogany in its wake. The tractor manoeuvres before releasing its load and shovelling it like a matchstick on to a growing pile of lumber at the edge of the clearing. Then, with a crunch of gears and a belch of diesel, it turns and lurches back into the forest.
This is sustainable forestry at its most brutal, yet in a few weeks’ time silence will return to this pocket of tropical forest in Guatemala’s Maya biosphere reserve (MBR). Nature will be left to reclaim the land and chainsaws won’t return for at least four years, as part of a strict management plan that is helping to buck the trend of rampant deforestation.
The 2.1m-hectare (5.2m-acre) MBR, in the northern province of Petén, was established by the Guatemalan government in 1990 and recognised by Unesco. It now anchors the largest natural forest in Central America, says José Román Carrera, a forestry director at the Rainforest Alliance, who was part of the initial discussions to establish the reserve.
The MBR is divided into three zones: a buffer (23%) protects the forest from encroachment around its southern edge, while the rest is divided between a core (39%), which is the base for national parks and conservation areas, and a multiple-use zone (38%), where people are allowed to make a living from the forest – as long as it is done sustainably.
The multiple-use zone includes 12 community forestry concessions (CFCs), each with 25-year contracts, collectively spread across 400,000 hectares. The first concession was established in 1997 following the end of the country’s long civil war and over the last 20 years they have been central to ending decades of deforestation in Central America’s most illegally logged jungle.
You can read the full piece, with links and photos, here, Legal logging and soaring saplings: the ‘green islands’ bucking the deforestation trend in central America.
Categories: Corruption, Environment, Guatemala, Indigenous peoples, Land, Resource Extraction, Solidarity in Action/Guatemala
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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